Stats Watch

The potential applicant pool for colleges and universities is going to grow significantly in some states between now and 2014, according to data gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics. The center reports that the number of public high school graduates is expected to increase in 23 states over the next eight years. Further, all four major regions of the country will be graduating more high school students, but the real boom will be happening in the West and South regions.

It's not surprising that community colleges lag behind their four-year counterparts when it comes to utilizing the internet to recruit and admit students. What might be surprising is how large that gap can be.

According to the "E-Recruiting Practices Report" from Noel-Levitz, just over 10 percent of two-year colleges surveyed buy students' e-mail addresses, compared to more than three quarters of four-year colleges and universities.

Ted Long, president of Elizabethtown College, a school of 1,600 students in central Pennsylvania, has seen many students go from economic struggle to success thanks to higher education. "It is a way for them to essentially move up the ladder compared to their parents," he says of lower-income students. "We have an alumnus in New York who is already vice president for an investment company, managing the energy portfolio, and he's supervising folks from Stanford and Harvard. He came from an ordinary background. There are stories like that all the time."

The Remedial Track

Network hacks and attacks are the biggest worry OF campus CIOs. The 2005 survey conducted by The Campus Computing Project reveals that 30.4 percent of IT executives are concerned about security breaches, up from 21.1 percent in 2004. These CIOs have good reason to fret: During 2005 half of them experienced direct hacks and attacks on their networks.

Following a pattern that has continued for several years, median senior-level administrative salaries outpaced inflation in the last year, growing by 3.5 percent from the 2004 to 2005 school years, according to a new survey from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).

Everyone knows that state funding for community colleges has dropped in recent years. Now a graduate student working on his Ph.D. has laid out a picture of just how much two-year schools have lost.

A new report by the James Irvine Foundation raises questions about campus demographic figures. Each year, a growing number of students list their race or ethnicity as "unknown." Nationally that figure has risen from 3.2 percent enrolled in 1991 to 5.9 percent in 2001, a nearly 100 percent increase.

A new report from the nonprofit Pew Hispanic Center may be welcomed as a step forward in efforts to enroll underrepresented minorities--or as a call for work that still needs to be done.

The report, released last month, looked at Hispanic first-time, full-time freshman enrollment in the country's most heavily Hispanic states (Texas, Florida, California, New Jersey, Illinois, Arizona, and New York). Indeed, Hispanic enrollment in those places increased by an average of 24 percent between 1996 and 2001. In Florida, the number of Hispanic freshmen grew by more than 50 percent.